We Know

Chapter 29

Dripping with sweat, I sat on the bench before my locker. I'd hit the weights, jumped rope for twenty minutes, then run myself to exhaustion on the treadmill. The workout should've cleared my head, but instead I felt jumpy, antsy to get home to see if DHL had dropped off a transparent cell phone at my government-issued front door.

I tugged open the locker. Through the curtains of my hanging clothes, my money clip sat on the thin metal shelf. Still fat with cash-I'd stopped at an ATM-but something was different. A piece of paper was tucked beneath the clip, parallel with the top bill. I withdrew the fold of cash, pulled the silver clip free, and stared down at a familiar film-processing slip.

One roll, ready for pickup.

The photograph looked like shit, but it did its job. Pronounced against a blur of yellow stucco were five large painted numbers. The picture had been taken at a slant, encompassing the corner street sign. All the info, in one neat little snapshot.

I lowered the photograph and stared at the real thing. Precise angle, precise distance. I was standing where the photographer had been when he'd snapped the shot-across the street on an apartment-complex driveway leading sharply down into an underground garage. As I leaned against the retaining wall, my head was just above street level. An inconspicuous spot. Which was good, given the dark sedan pulled to the curb in front of the neighboring building.

The picture was one of only two that were exposed in the roll, waiting for me at the photomat I'd visited last time. Logic dictated that Mack was the guy who'd taken them. After all, he'd left me the first film-processing slip. But two things bothered me: The quality of the picture was poor by the standards of a professional photographer. And the film was a standard 35mm, not the high-end Ektachrome he'd used before.

I slid the second photo out from behind the first. A head-on of an apartment door. Above the peephole, in tarnished brass-2G. Anyone or anything could be behind that door, and anyone or anything could have been leading me there. But I had to go.

I glanced back up the road at the dark sedan. Tinted windows. Engine off. But I knew that the car wasn't unoccupied. The mole Wydell had warned me about?

Bracing myself, I stepped out from cover and walked briskly up the sidewalk, heading away from the sedan, hugging the buildings. The glut of apartments here, south of Pico near Lincoln, had been untouched by the Westside richification. Peeling paint, crumbling stucco. Tree roots had buckled the concrete in several places. I was sweating, desperate to look over my shoulder. I tried to hurry, then tried to slow down. No car door opened behind me; no engine roared.

Turning the corner, I passed my parked truck and looped back behind the complex. I hopped over a locked gate onto the pool patio. The door from the courtyard into the building was unlocked. I took the stairs, easing out onto the second floor. A damp hall, carpet still holding on from the seventies. Down the length, past a laundry room, through a fire door, and there it was. 2G.

The door was slightly ajar, the latch resting against the plate.

I stood and listened. Nothing.

I didn't like that unsecured door one bit. Before I went through it, I wanted to check out the rest of the floor, scout some exits, make Liffman proud.

I reversed down the hall to an emergency stairwell that dumped out into a side alley. On my way back to 2G, I ducked into the laundry room. Dry heat. Shoving the window open, I glanced down. Six feet below was a pool shed.

Cautiously I made my way back up the hall. Through that open sliver in the doorway of 2G came a sharp odor. I knocked, and the door wobbled open a few inches. No answer.

I stepped inside. The reek of gasoline. The sun was low and fat in the street-facing window, making me squint. A figure in a chair, head bowed. Newspaper spread on the floor under and around him.

The place was torn apart. Drawers emptied. Couch cushions slashed. Chairs flipped over. A familiar tableau. The big window was open, a faint breeze lending body to a limp, shoved-back curtain.

"Mack?" I eased forward. The front of the man's shirt was stained. A crimson bib.

My shoes padded on the moist newspaper. The print wadded and blurred, soaked in gasoline. The man was bound to the chair, cloth strips tying his wrists and ankles. Wild blond hair, just like Charlie's.

My breath came back to me as an echo, as if off the walls of a cavern. I reached out an unsteady hand, gripped the hair, and raised the head. The resemblance was shocking. Not just the Mick Jagger mouth but also the wide brow and intense, neurotic eyes. The Voice in the Dark, a dead ringer for his father as a younger man. The major difference being the second smile etched across his throat.

Stunned, I let go of Mack's head, and it flopped forward again, chin to chest. Mindful of the window, I dropped to the floor. His bare foot was inches from my head. I fought my stomach back into place. I hadn't seen a dead body since Frank's, and the smell alone about undid me.

The abraded flesh, the restraints, the gasoline dousing-no question he'd been persuaded to talk. Which meant he'd talked about me. And likely revealed his photo-slip gimmick, which they'd imitated with a lousy picture shot on cheap film.

I'd either sneaked in past whoever was watching or walked into their setup. Despite the open window, the gasoline fumes were starting to get to me. I crawled over to the window and peered down at the street. The sedan was still parked in its spot, the impervious black windshield throwing off a glare.

I turned, my back to the wall beneath the window, regarding the tossed apartment. Mack's killer or killers looking for whatever Charlie had been trying to sell. Or for the banded hundreds, still crammed into the pasta pot beneath my kitchen counter, where even Mack didn't know they were. Mack had told me he had a second key from Charlie. I assumed he kept it hidden-but where? Probably close, where he could access it in an emergency. I thought about Charlie's sleeping on top of that floor safe every night. Maybe he'd taught his son where to conceal things, as Frank had taught me. Frank and Charlie, platoonmates and colleagues, had a few tricks in common. Had they been trained to seek out the same hiding places?

I crawled to the sink and, staying low, reached up over the counter into the sink and worked my hand into the garbage disposal.

A magnetic box under the lip.

I yanked it free, fought it open. Another key.

Brass, just like the other one, but this was numbered 228. Probably right next to the P.O. box that had held the torn page of numerals. I'd been within a foot of whatever this key guarded. Oblivious. I flipped it over, read the familiar print: U.S. GOV'T, UNLAWFUL TO DUPLICATE. I shoved the key into the case, the case into my front pocket.

What else could I find that they hadn't? And how much time did I have?

With mounting panic I scurried toward the bedroom, skidding over fallen books, the titles staring up at me in bold-Living Sober, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, The Big Book. A stripe of wet carpet ran under and ahead of me, a guiding trail. My face was down near the floor, close enough that the vapor stung my eyes. Mack stared at me from the chair, a dark smudge at the edge of my vision.

In the bedroom a file cabinet by the double futon had been knocked over, photographs and papers scattered. I dug through the mess on the floor. Loose film cases, holding Ektachrome 100. Another contained a dime bag of weed. So much for living sober. Among glossy eight-by-tens of armchairs and bookcases, I found a picture of me climbing down the telephone pole the night I'd gone to Frank's old house.

The nightstand light had tilted over, throwing an ellipse of gold across a book. Twelve Steps. No dust jacket.

I'd slid over another book wrapped in that dust jacket on my way to the bedroom. Clambering on all fours back to the main room, doing my best to ignore the slumped, bound form across the way, I flung the books aside until I found the dust-jacket lettering-Twelve Steps. I tore off the cover to reveal what it was hiding-a leather-bound journal.

My fingers moved furiously through the pages. A ledger. Some pluses. A lot of minuses. Next to each sum was what I assumed to be a basketball score. LA 98, Miami 102~ $8,000. NC 88, Duke 90, $8,000. Interspersed were steep interest charges. The debt, as of last month, was $383,918.00.

The Voice in the Dark had been clear. I need my money. Not I want my money. As soon as the other addictions had fallen away, a new one had grabbed him.

I forced my eyes back to Mack. From behind, despite the cramped angles of his bound limbs, he looked as if he'd nodded off. Bound and doused with gasoline-the style seemed more crime syndicate than Secret Service. Had Mack been killed not by Bilton's crew but by his bookie's people? So why would they want to lure me to the scene with a photomat slip? The answer came with a shudder: Mack would've told them I had the money.

Bookie murder or Service hit. Neither option a comforting one.

I scrambled into the bedroom again to continue my search. As I crossed the threshold, something fell from the back of the ledger. An old-fashioned envelope, yellowed and brittle. It was unopened, a date scrawled across the seam in faded blue ink: 5/91. The month of Frank's death. Crouching, I tore at the flap, the paper slitting my finger. A Polaroid fell out into my waiting palm. Bilton at a campaign field office, wearing a smile and a too-narrow brown tie, his arm around a beaming woman in her late twenties. She wore turquoise dangly earrings, and her hair was center-parted behind a pouf of bangs. A sign behind them proclaimed BILTON FOR GOVERNOR! Nothing on the reverse.

Our future president popping up in the back of a gambling ledger with a woman other than his wife. Who was she in all this?

No time to ponder-someone could kick in the front door any second. Pushing the photo into my back pocket, I looked desperately around the bedroom. In my excitement I'd risen from my half squat. Standing in full view of the window. The angle still hid me from the street and the sedan below, but I stared with dread at the windows of the apartments across.

A wink of light from the opposing rooftop caught my eye.

Before I could react, I heard something strike the kitchenette, simultaneous with a pneumatic thump from outside, like a tennis ball leaving a court cannon. I looked through the doorway. Something pinged around the small corner kitchen, sending up chips of tile. Shot in through the open window one room over? I watched it spin on the cheap linoleum, then stop.

A miniature rocket, no bigger than two inches, narrow stem connecting the warhead to a fin assembly. It looked like a fat, olive drab dart.

I don't remember leaping. I only remember flying in the air toward the back wall when the overpressure lifted me from behind, flipping me over. Shrapnel studded the walls instantly. Air sucked past me, drawn toward the front door, and then the room seemed to pulse, flames billowing up everywhere at once, clouds of brilliant orange. I scrambled to my feet as the flames advanced, curling the pictures on the floor, scaling the walls.

I shot a frantic look out the window. The roof across, now empty. Down below, the dark sedan remained in its place, but the door was thrown open, the driver's seat empty. My hand shot to my pocket, instinctively checking for the magnetic key case, but it was gone, the pocket torn. I spun around desperately, the fire flicking at me. The box lay shattered near the flaming futon. Falling to my knees, I jabbed at it. Melting plastic pieces and the top half of the key. It had snapped, a perfect break right in the middle of the brass teeth, but where was the bottom? The fire closing in, I ran a hand through the carpet, until a hot pain bored into my palm. There it was, in a nest of burned fibers. Before I could talk myself out of it, I seized it. Hot metal singed my fingertips, but I clutched it and ran toward the front door.

The fire grabbed at my pants, my hands. Mack's corpse was alight, the smell sickening. Flames ate through the cloth restraints, his corpse sagging as each gave way. I flew past and staggered through the front door into the hall.

A few neighbors were out, older folks staring shocked, a kid on an old-fashioned scooter. A sturdy man was pinning the fire door open with his heel, shouting for everyone to clear out. Past him, way down the hall, a tall, powerful figure wheeled into view around the turn.

Reid Sever.

We stared at each other, me in a half crouch, him frozen in his dark suit. And then I was on my feet, sprinting for him. His hand went to his hip, but I crashed left, hard into the laundry room, and flew out the window, landing with a bang on the pool shed six feet below. My shoes slid out from under me, and I ass-bumped and skidded off the edge, landing in a full sprawl on the concrete. The severed top of the key bounced free from my hand, knocking the pavement with the ring of a flipped coin. I rolled once and caught it just above the surface of the murky pool.

Glancing back, I saw Sever leaning out of the laundry room, readying for the drop, smoke billowing from the neighboring window. I bolted. Over the fence, up the street, fighting my car keys out. Two blocks away and accelerating, I still couldn't catch my breath.

I had to get home before they beat me there and seized the rucksack holding that torn page of mysterious numbers.